Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was raised as a red diaper baby.
I believe in a libertarian communist society.
People are never free of trying to be content.
I'm a Bookchinite, and nobody has a right to claim that but me.
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
I regard Marxism as the most sinister and the most subtle form of totalitarianism.
I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other.
I got deeply involved with the Trotskyists. I assumed simply that my enemy's enemies were my friends.
I'm by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier.
When I die Bookchinism comes to an end, and all the allusions to it both among Marxists and anarchists.
Deny my individuality and I become an animal, mute, a mere creature of all the forces that act upon me.
Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.
I believe that there has to be an ideal and I favour an ethical anarchism which can be cohered into an ideal.
The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
I will never surrender the rights of the individual - the complete rights of the individual - to any "ism" whatever.
I feel that we have some opportunity in North America to go back and say the American Revolution was the real thing.
I think it's terribly important that networks of anarchists establish themselves with a view toward educating people.
I have a great admiration for pacifism, but I'm not a pacifist, mainly because I would defend myself if I were attacked.
An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
My anarchism is frankly anarcho-communalism, and it's eco-anarchism as well. And it's not oriented toward the proletariat.
My main interests right now are to publish, to write, to explicate various views which I hope have an impact on thinking people.
I'm not sitting in judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political process whose very nature they oppose.
Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society.
I know one thing: that you can do a lot of things but if you don't educate people into conscious anarchism it gets frittered away.
The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society.
I am concerned that people who admire [Ayn] Rand are not often critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications of [her] novels.
New England has a strong tradition of localism. What is ordinarily called election day in most of the United States is called town meeting day in Vermont.
My feeling is that whatever people elect to do, insofar as they don't deny the rights of others, every effort should be made to defend their right to do it.
I've had training in electronics engineering, of all things, and in languages. But I've never taken any degree, something I share with Lewis Mumford, I think.
I'm convinced more than ever that capitalism, with its technological development, has not been an advance toward freedom but has been an enormous setback of freedom.
My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.
Realistically speaking, Ayn Rand should not have opposed the antidraft movement and supported the Vietnam War effort - in effect, she supported military conscription.
I don't want to think any longer simply in terms of the Spanish Revolution or the Russian Revolution. It doesn't make any sense to talk [Peter] Makhno to an American.
My communism attempts basically to create a shared society, that's all; a shared society in which individuality will flourish, along with love, and along with mutual respect.
There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.
I'm sorry that some self-styled anarchists have picked up on the word spirit and have turned me into a theological ecologist, a notion which I think is crude beyond all belief.
I don't think that the Soviet Union and China are accidents, aberrations; I think they follow from Marxism-Leninism. I think that Leninism comes out of Marx's basic convictions.
Terms that are related to individuals like Marxist, or Hegelian, or Bakuninist, or Kropotkinist, are completely outside my intellectual and emotional horizon. I'm a follower of no one.
Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.
We don't have to go around as the Protestant reformation did, or as the socialist revolution did, and execute each other as soon as we are successful - assuming we'll ever be successful.
I do have an intense respect for pacifists, because I believe that ultimately, if we are to have a truly humanistic as well as libertarian society, violence will have to be banished on this planet.
I'm less influenced by any of [Karl] Marx's ideas today than I've ever been in my life, and most significantly Marx's theory of historical materialism, which I think is virtually a debris of despotism.
As for the workers' movement, I find that I reach workers more easily as neighbors than I do standing outside the factory despairingly giving out a leaflet telling them to take over, say the Ford plant.
The only conclusion I could arrive at with the death of the workers' movement as a revolutionary force - you know the imagery of the proletarian vanguard, or proletarian hegemony - has been the community.
I believe that if we do have a commonality of beliefs we should clarify them, we should strengthen their coherence and we should also develop common projects that produce a lived community of relationships.
People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights - this is the true left in the United States.
I've developed my anarchism, my critique of Marxism, which has been the most advanced bourgeois ideology I know of, into a community of ideas and ultimately a common sense of responsibilities and commitments.
I believe that the American people should defend themselves if any attempt is made to take over the government by coup d'etat, whether by the military or the Marxists or any people who profess to be anarchists.